Draw Menu Overview

You can enhance any map view you have displayed by adding text labels, lines, polygons and a wide variety  of other shapes by using the Draw menu for this purpose. You can also use the Draw menu to start the creation of land use/land clutter (also referred to as: LULC, land use (clutter), LUC, land use, clutter or groundcover) and building files along with service area boundaries.

To draw a shape object, select what you want to draw/create from the Draw menu. For Ellipses, Polygons, Polylines, Rectangles and Service Area Boundaries, your cursor will change to a pointing arrow that you use to click and designate control points in the drawn object, or click and drag to draw and size the object. Drawing a Precise Circle, Hexagon, Precise Rectangle, Symbol, Text, Land Use Region, Buildings or Traffic Region objects starts by opening a dialog box where additional information is needed to complete drawing that object

Objects created from the draw menu are placed in a map layer called EDX Graphic Objects. This layer was described in the Edit Menu chapter. What is important to remember is all objects drawn using the draw menu are placed in this single layer. You have options to select all and deselect all objects through the edit menu, or you can shift-click to select individual objects in the layer.

To set a shape object: after drawing/creating the object, left-click the mouse button anywhere away from the object line.

To unset a shape object: after the object is set, you can shift & left-click the mouse on the object line and it will “unset” the object which can now be moved around as described below.

To move a shape object: before the object is set, you can shift & left-click on the object line and while keeping the shift key depressed, move the object to another position on the map view.

To resize a shape object: some objects, such as Polygons, Polylines and Service Area Boundaries can be resized after they have been set. After unsetting the object (see unset a shape object), place the mouse pointer on one of the control points and then press shift & left-click the mouse. Keeping the shift key and left-click depressed, you can drag the control point to another location. Any of the Polygon, Polyline and Service Area Boundary control points can be moved in this manner.

Additional information about specific features can be found in the related articles linked below.